The Greatest Whodunnit of the Century, 2005

This was an assignment for my art history class, during our discussion of fluxus art. This is an instruction piece, where the instructions were to rip up papers, drop them onto a canvas, and glue them down exactly where they fall. Those were the only requirements, and it was interesting to see how varied the pieces turned out. Here is my piece, I had a lot of fun making it. My statement is below.

Artist’s Commentary on piece titled, “The Greatest Whodunnit of the Century.” *

"The creation of my piece involved compiling the full contents of my Livejournal (an online journal which allows friends to read your entries at your discretion) into one Word document (which ended up being twenty-three pages single spaced at 12-point font with no margins). I printed the entire document and ripped up the pages two at a time. After every two pages, I sprinkled down a layer [of the shredded text] onto my canvas and pasted them down with gloss medium (it is stronger and clearer than glue, more flexible, and causes less warping [of the paper].) Every page was ripped up and sprinkled down, so, in concept, this piece includes all my Livejournal writings, unabridged, from the entire lifespan of my journal (about two years and running, with the newest entry [as of the creation of this piece] having been made on Wednesday, February 9th, 2005.)

However, some scraps were inevitably left out of the piece because they fell off the edge of the canvas and were not glued down. The quantity of these scraps equates to about three full pages of text, however the words on these three pages which have been omitted were a random average from across all twenty-three pages of my journal – in a way, this represents some strange form of random censorship, in that not even the censor can control what is concealed, and, undoubtedly, some of the words accidentally left in the piece are more incriminating than some of the words omitted. The reason I claim that my entire Livejournal is in this piece is because every word of my journal fluttered to the ground and was therefore involved in the process of creation. Since the omissions represent a random average, it is fair to say that the inclusions, on average, represent the entire essence of my journal. And, since my journal entries represent a random sample of events that have occurred in my life in the past two years, it is also fair to say that this piece represents my entire life during the period of April 2003 through February 2005.

The entire piece is representative of the idea that, out of all the writings or pieces of art a person creates over the course of his life, some are randomly (or perhaps no-so-randomly) lost to time and space. They still exist in that at some point somebody read them and remembered them (in this case, anybody who reads my Livejournal) but they will not be solidified in history because they were not included in the collection of this writer’s or artist’s “Complete Works.” For the better or for the worse, this loss is unpreventable.

Finally, I have to admit that there is one single scrap of paper on my piece which was placed with intention. In the creation of my piece, I allowed my friends Chris and Hal to help me rip up the sheets of paper (as some writers or artists would allow friends to help them sort their life’s works) and Hal came across one scrap that happened to read, “I think” very clearly in the center. I pasted it down in a spot that had no scraps on it yet, and avoided covering it with any other scraps. This one ripped piece reading, “I think” represents the one epitomizing work of an artist’s or writer’s collection, which the general public (and sometimes the creator himself) agrees must be preserved from the random loss that the rest of my ripped paper piece represents. This one piece can defy time and space in being replicated and sustained for as long as mankind makes the effort to save it."

* The piece is titled, “The Greatest Whodunnit of the Century” because those were the first words printed on the twenty-three pages of text I used.